Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

There isn’t much that’s important about the loneliness of an inanimate object.

The idea of whether or not the object in question even feels loneliness or anything else for that matter is, some would say, meaningless; not worth thinking about. To the eye of the beholder, though, this appearance of loneliness can radiate certain feelings, illusions that translate into a need to ask questions.

Like this place. It has always intrigued me. Why was the farm abandoned? When? Is the land still farmed? Where is the family now? Do they even care?

All of these thoughts have been with me since I first saw this crumbling abandoned farmhouse ten years ago just off Bruce Road 3. I ask myself these same questions each time I drive by. Year after year it stands like a sentinel, naked, at the whim of weather and time, on a small hill overlooking its fields.

There is a rough, rutted, snow buried, single lane road that runs uphill to the crumbling house. The fields slope down, running away from it. A fence runs parallel to nowhere. I’ve often been tempted to drive up, to explore, to see if any clues to the house’s history might be lying about.

But I always held back. It would be wrong to trespass. The words ‘leave me alone’ always drifted down to me. ‘Respect my solitude’.

Endurance, not loneliness, is what is in this house. It will stand against time for as long as time will allow. As we all will. One day it will succumb.

Until that day and after, I will have this photograph to remind me of what we must endure.

Under the street lamps that pool their light on the now white road wind whips the flurries into individual cyclones whirling about helter skelter. Cedars on the roadside go dark, lost in the shadows, lost in the black of night. In the cone of the streetlights the snow takes on highlights that accentuate its movement. It dances with the wind, blurring in flight, never, it seems, touching down, hovering around and inside the beam’s pool bringing new life to the light. Night Snow is different than snow falling at daybreak…more menacing. You are unsure of what it leaves behind until dawn crawls up the dark trailing early morning light to show you its night work. Night Snow is like a secret gathering, an army, a relentless force building for an attack at daybreak when the world wakes and is forced to face the consequences of all that Night Snow has left behind.

Ice is hard. Resistant. Stubborn. Ice can withstand any single human effort to break through…especially if ice has transformed concrete steps into a glistening, smooth, intransient obstacle that should be left alone. There is no point in trying to break it down (as I did) to get a better foothold – to get a better angle on the object you’re trying to photograph.

Such foolishness can possibly lead to disaster. I sometimes hurry to get things done – and in my unfocussed haste – misjudge and make mistakes that do not end well. I am a victim of my own stupidity.

There is a millisecond between attempt and failure when you are completely unaware of what you’ve just done. In that microscopic moment between slipping and landing you see nothing. The world around you becomes blank. First it’s simply, “Here I am trying to break through the ice with my foot. Here I am on my back lying on the ice. How did that happen?” Your next thought is, “Where’s my brand new expensive camera? Did I land on it? NO! Here it is secure in my hand that’s extended above my prone body. AT LEAST I WAS CONCIOUS ENOUGH TO SACRIFICE MY BODY TO PROTECT IT!” Then it’s, “Why can’t I get up?”

Because you’re lying at the bottom of uneven ice-coated steps, stupid!

Thankfully there are no witnesses to my next ridiculous act. Camera held high, I rolled over, grabbed the ice-coated railing with my free hand and painfully pulled myself to a more secure level. It took a while. Ice does not give up its victims without making them struggle. Eventually I made it. Looking down at the frozen steps I just scaled I chastised myself for being so reckless. And stupid.

When we take chances success is usually 50-50. Clearly this was a chance I shouldn’t have taken. Any go or no-go decision is often quick and thoughtless. Spur of the moment as they say. It is always difficult to judge the wisdom of one’s next move until after you’ve made it.

Life, the pundits say, is about taking chances. “Find a Way or Make One. Just Do It. Who Dares Wins. Deeds Not Words.” Pick any current phrase that suits you. Sometimes the taking works – sometimes it doesn’t. This time for me, it didn’t. That’s just the way it is.

I didn’t get that just-right angle for the shot I was looking for. But, I hurt too much to be disappointed.

That is not any great event. But more and more, as I pile on the years, I find myself taking more quiet time on a regular basis. Its time when I put down the IPad. Ignore the ‘bings’ of new notifications. Ignore the radio, magazines and newspapers and clear my mind of everything that I thought was important a mere moment ago. Meditation? Perhaps. As age advances, memory recedes – the everyday things I once took for granted now have a bit of mystery to them. I often wonder, “Is my mind still trustworthy”? It has taken on a thin layer – a patina, as it were. Recollection is not instantaneous. Earlier images and memories are hidden somewhere. Its as if they’re painted over, only to show through in their own time.

As I was contemplating this “state of mind” of mine I recalled similar thoughts from others I had tucked into my notebooks.

Here they are. Make of them what you wish:

As I grow older I become ever more a stick in the mud – contrary ornery and difficult. Were I not married to a magnificent woman who keeps me young I would end up being an evil old man eating beans out of the tin. I take great joy in seeing what you do, what you read, what you support. My Facebook friends list, though large, is periodically pared down enough that it actually consists of people I genuinely like and am interested in. If I should prove hesitant to join you in doing the very same thing you are doing it doesn’t mean that what you’re doing isn’t good, valuable and worthwhile. It just means that I am doing other things. Love you all.

Robert Warren

I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience.

Jose Micard Teixeria

“There are other assets of old age. The storms and stresses of life, the ambitions and competitions are over. The futile and unnecessary and false responsibilities have fallen from one’s shoulders and one’s conscience”.

Sun shadows fall on the diminished snow and wind wicks away whatever white grains remain as the contradiction of sun and cold conspire to sacrifice only the surface, revealing nothing but more of the same. Winter is not yet done with us.

Memories can sometimes fade. Events can become vague as years grow on you. One ember of memory rekindled itself these past few days and I suddenly recalled why December has always been a dreary month for me. It is the month my father died. I think it was on December 13. I can’t remember how long ago. but it is so many years ago. I wrote a piece about him a few years back to try and recall him and his influence on me. It is part truth, part patch-work of stories heard and fragments of incidents that have stayed with me. I may be fictionalizing the reality to get at the truth of the man. Forgive me Peppino, if there are things left out.

First it was the death of his mother.

She passed away when he was nine. He couldn’t forgive her for dying, for leaving him alone, so, he invented a story about her running away with another man.It was his way of keeping her alive and telling himself that his anger was justified.

At the age of ten he was taken out of school to apprentice as a bricklayer. He said he had to work to help support his younger brothers. Shortly after that his father took his brothers and immigrated to Canada. He believed they left to escape his invented shame of a wife and mother’s infidelity. The family home was sold. He told himself, it was the only way his father could pay for the many debts he left behind. Then he was sent to live with his grandmother because his uncles were leaving for Canada one by one. According to him, no one else could be bothered to take him in. A year later, with a forged passport, he boarded a ship to Canada. Nobody in the village, he claimed, wanted him anymore.

When he ran through his self-created list of self-inflicted indignities he believed there was no other choice. It was the only way he could quench the resentment he harbored deep in his soul. Truth was a reality he couldn’t handle.

He knew he couldn’t emigrate on his own unless he was of age. His flimsy, faded Birth Certificate says he was born February 23, 1910. He clumsily erased his birth date and boldly wrote over the remnants of the numbers, changing the 10 to an 8. The initial pen marks still show through.

The penmanship and ink are blatantly different from the original, but were good enough to get him the passport he needed. This slight of hand turned a boy of fourteen into a young man of sixteen. If you look closely at the document you can see how deceptive he was becoming. Duplicity, for him, was a latent talent.

He sailed alone, third class, on a boat full of immigrants equally confused and uncertain of their future. And he took all of his anger with him.

.

In the vast halls of Ellis Island amid the noise and confusion he stands boldly in front of the immigration officer. Alone, disoriented, his eyes watch the official examining his documents. He reaches into his pocket and grabs a bone handled jackknife. Holding it tightly in his fist the feel of the steel gives him comfort. Only when he hears the thump of the stamp on his entry papers does he relax and let it slip from his grip.

The customs official approved his blatant deceit. If such a clumsy lie could gain him a new beginning, he took it as permission to live the balance of his life believing in the power of lies. He came this far on guile because he suspected that circumstance would continue to betray him if he didn’t pay attention. It never occurred to him that he was lying to himself.

As he grew into a man, his trade was the one true thing that gave him satisfaction. His skill as a bricklayer was his only source of pride. He promised himself he would never let anyone take it away.

On the job no one challenged him. He was the master bricklayer, the only one allowed to raise the corners. As he crafted a perfect pyramid of bricks, he sang “As Time Goes By,” under his breath thinking himself Humphrey Bogart. The others watched and waited. With line and level he laid out perfect right angles as a guide for each course to come, a precise line for the others to follow. When done he would stand back and throw down his trowel, the point thunking into the mortar board. The other masons took this as their signal to raise the wall to the exactness of his corners.

After a brief moment he would smile, spit in his hands, grab the hockey-taped handle of his trowel, and with one smooth, powerful motion scoop up mortar, spread it straight, and then slice a crevice down the center of the cement with the point of his trowel. At the same time he grabbed a brick with his free hand, tossed it into the air so that it turned to the right surface, caught it and placed it deftly at the start of another course.

Sometimes he hockey-taped his hands and fingers. Mostly when he was handling solid sixteen-inch blocks, laying the foundation of some larger building. The black tape protected the calluses that had grown thick over the years. I could feel their roughness when he grabbed my wrist when I misbehaved as a child. You could not break his vice like grip. Although he was a small man, he had the arms of a bodybuilder.

Over the years, drinking became his other escape. It was the only thing that calmed his anger. But that was just another lie he told himself because the more he drank, the angrier he became.

Then there came the time when he couldn’t work anymore. His skill was failing with his health. Arthritis stiffened his fingers. Even though he taped his hands, he now wore leather gloves to keep the calluses from tearing with the coarseness of the brick.

All the masons he worked with realized what was happening. When he began letting others raise the corners they knew he was done, as did he.

The corners on which he built his life could no longer support him. One night he came home, dropped his tool bag on the landing at the top of the cellar stairs, and left it there. He knew he was finished. He had no one to blame. And now he was angry with himself because he allowed his drinking to destroy the only thing that meant anything to him.

Lies are of no use to him anymore. He is finally facing the truth. These empty days allow the old bricklayer to focus not on himself – or his need for alcohol – but on his pain as punishment and his suffering as penance. He knows he is dying and, in his own way, he is begging for forgiveness, consciously reaching out to everyone. You only have to look into his eyes to see how he is resigned to the task. Humility, never one of his strengths, is now something he is learning to live with. Sobriety, once a stranger is becoming a familiar companion as he counts down his last days. The resentment is gone. This is the most peaceful time he has ever known.

There is a noticeable change in his personality that unnerves everyone who knew him for what he was…a malevolent man who lived with alcohol and anger for most of his life. Now his family sees someone else, someone shrunken, frail and weak, who speaks softly and works at smiling more. There is an unfamiliar gentleness about him, which they find hard to match with forgiveness. They are struggling because they know he has no other alternative. He needs to make peace with his family.

I bring him fresh peaches from the corner fruit market. We sit at the kitchen table. He takes the peaches out of the bag, one by one, weighing each in his trembling hand, gauging their firmness. Those that are too ripe he sets aside.

“There’s a special way to cut up a peach so the stone comes out clean,” he says reaching into his vest pocket for his old jackknife. “I liked to slice them up and dip them in wine.” The memory brings a smile to his face.

“I show you.”

As he tries to pull the blade open, his knife falls to the table. He can’t control the spasms in his hands. Transparent skin is drawn tight making the tendons prominent. There is a slight shaking in his movement. But he clasps his fingers together and raises his hands to his chin as if he’s praying and it disappears.

His frustration quickly changes to acquiescence. He looks at the knife as if it too has finally betrayed him. Staring out of the kitchen window he lets out a small sigh.

Magenta veins bulge on the back of the hand that pushes it toward me. “You take it,” he says.

“No.” I push it back to him. “You keep it. Its yours.”

He places his hand on mine. “Now I give it to you.”

The jackknife’s stag horn handle is worn thin from use. On one side, a slim silver plate is engraved with a barely visible name. Each blade unfolds easily. One must have broken some time ago. It is less than half the length of the main blade. You can see where it was ground down to a sharp point. The cutting edge has a deep half-moon curve in it from constant sharpening. Along the back, a corkscrew fits snugly in an indentation in the bone. Beside it rests a needle-like awl. Between them, running the length of the knife is a steel shaft that hooks over the end. Its purpose is still a mystery to me. Two grooves, one on each side, are cut into the bone end. They are empty. I can only guess that they held removable needles or picks that were lost over the years.

The knife fits perfectly in the palm of my hand. When I make a fist it disappears, but I can feel the weight of its steel forged decades ago. With the blade fully extended the weight gives way to a delicate balance. And when I slice into a fresh peach it cuts clean and effortlessly.

After the funeral the men who worked with the old bricklayer come back to the house. An atmosphere of easiness settles in the kitchen as they loosen their ties, unbutton their shirt collars and sit around the table trying to get comfortable in their ill-fitting suits. They tell stories about the old bricklayer, paying offhanded tribute to his memory but never once mentioning his drinking. Even though he spent his working days in an alcoholic haze, to them, it had nothing to do with his skill as a mason. Their stories anger me because they are talking about a part of his life that made him happy. They fail to see the demons that dominated the man.

No one notices his wife enter the kitchen. When they see her, though, all conversation stops. She lifts the old bricklayer’s tool bag and drops it in the middle of the table. The dust of years of use drifts up from the ragged sack. The handles and corners are reinforced with duct tape in an attempt to preserve something that was clearly falling apart.

I slide the decayed leather straps through the tarnished silver buckles and pull it open. Everything inside was clean. Every trace of mortar that usually clung to the tools was scrapped away. There was not a speck of concrete on the trowels. Fresh hockey tape was carefully wrapped around their handles and the handles of his brick hammers. The chisels were sharpened and the joint makers polished.

I lay each piece on the kitchen table. Silently they take them and pass them around. Each man holding a trowel or hammer in his hand, testing the weight, finding the balance, trying to get a sense of how the old bricklayer wielded each tool. They were searching for the finesse they saw when he raised the corners. And it was enough for them to handle the instruments of a man they considered a master.

“Take what you want,” said his wife, not even trying to hide her bitterness.

That she would give away the old bricklayer’s tools surprises them. The men quickly glance at each other then quietly divide the spoils. Just as quietly they rise from the table and leave the room taking the remnants of the old bricklayer’s legacy with them. That side of his life is where it belongs.

But, the tools only defined part of the man. We were left with the reality of unwanted memories.

“They took everything.” She paused as if regretting what she just did. Then she closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. “None of it was worth anything to me,”

I take a peach from the bowl on the table. With my father’s jackknife I cut out a single slice, dip it into a glass of wine and offer it to her.

“He gave you his knife,” she said taking the fruit.

“Yes,” I replied. “Didn’t he bring it all the way from the Old Country?”

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past…”

Shakespeare – Sonnet 30

Recently a haze of childhood memories clouded my mind struggling to become clear. I was back in the city of my early years, revisiting the people and places that were so much a part of my early life. To my Italian relatives, especially my elderly aunts, those formative years were still clear. It was easy for them for they never left Sault Ste. Marie. They never abandoned the memories. I, unfortunately, did for a different life in a different place. I depended on their stories to bring those days into sharper focus.

One morning, I walked with N. to the now closed Soo Locks where I use to come to watch the big Lakers carefully creep through the canal leaving barely enough room on either side. I would marvel when the water gates closed at their stern and marvel even more when water levels rose lifting the ship ever so slowly up to meet the open expanse of the St. Marys River, before it crept away creaking and groaning under dead slow speed.

Looking down the length of the waterway I saw the long span of the International Bridge to Soo Michigan rising over the river. Beneath it, rusting and abandoned was the old rail bridge. It didn’t take me long to remember what childhood friends and I did there on lazy Sault Ste. Marie summer afternoons.

Railway tracks ran behind our schoolyard straight to the trestle. We would follow them, running between the steel rails trying to stay on the railroad ties and not touch the thick gravel. We paused only when we spotted a spike sticking up above the wood. This was a prize we stopped to pry loose.

It was only when we approached the trestle that we slowed down. Here we had to be careful. As we moved out under its steel span the ground gave way to open air. We were suspended over water now. To us, it was a long way to fall. We stepped carefully from tie to tie, yelling at the top of our lungs partly to keep fear at bay and partly to prove that we knew no fear. To hestitate would invite the taunt, “codardo, codardo, codardo, andare a casa di mamma.” Translated it branded you a sissy telling you to, “run home to mamma you coward.” None of us ever did.

Once across and before we ran down the embankment to the river we always looked back. It was in that one brief silent moment that we realized it was our only path. We knew the times when the freight trains rolled through so we were sure of safe passage home. And when the whistle blew for the sift change at the steel plant we knew we must be on our way. A freight was due through about an hour after that. Any later getting home would always mean trouble. Somehow our mothers knew where we had been even though they repeatedly forbid us to go there.

There is a river of memories that flows through us all. Its source springs from things past. These memories are but embers sitting silently, buried deep in our soul. All we need do is breathe on them gently to ignite a remembrance of things past.

This blog is about my hometown and the simplicity of life that informs it. It will also digress, now and then, into things that catch my interest and stuff that influences my life. It is also a writing exercise. Pure indulgence on my part. Where did I come from? Lived in Toronto, Canada's biggest city. Lived in Sault Ste Marie, Hamilton, and Montreal as well. Moved to one of Ontario's smallest towns (Southampton). Worked as a Copywriter then Creative Director for large, international advertising agencies with experience all across Canada, New York, Chicago, L.A., London England and Hong Kong. Now I write as a hobby.
Enjoy!